G-users are interested in getting you to look at whatever their product is. Ads pretending to be a group of friends, with a smattering of people who believe Pepsi is their friend. An online business convention.

Like Facebook and Twitter, without the people.

Rite of passage.

They just built (bought, LOL) all these "services" over the years, and did Android, but it took Steve Fucking Jobs (RIP) to TELL them they had something that could be unified? Seriously?

Love the way Jobs was quoted: "He told them something to the effect of...'[purported quote]' ".

Sure, I imagine G's goal all along was an ID service: GOOG doesn't like the anonymity of information/posts on the internet because their main brand (Search) is serving up these pages and they want the pages to be more reliable; they want accountability on the web. (I completely disagree with the concept, but that's not the point). Apple wants a good web experience, too, but only on their hardware. No way (imo) Jobs would have said shit to Page about a homegrown social network without mentioning hardware, and he surely wouldn't have lauded Androids as the hardware (not closed enough). The companys' mindsets are way too different for these types of collaborations. (Actually, they hate each other.)

within two years, of course — if you keep the same phone or buy one elsewhere, you're out of the contract. The option seems to be buying the new phone full price from Verizon to stay with the unlimited plan (pay $800 to keep the contract vs the former $300). Compared to their other plans ($80/10GB), and assuming you use at least the 10GB, staying in the grandfathered plan is still cheaper than tiered. (ESP if you tether everything in your house and use way more than 10GB/month.) But fck it, I was only with VZW for a few of the grandfathered unlimited contracts. I'll find another carrier with better plans.

Absolutely. Shit infomercials for the most part.

ITA w clarke/asimov/heinlein, zelazny is mind-blowing, burroughs is must-read.. simmons' hyperion series, greg bear, niven/pournelle all fun reads. I also recall really enjoying some of the older stephen baxter novels (hard sci fi), but haven't read him in years (just noticed he's got a boatload of new books). I'd call baxter accessible hard sci fi (you don't have to crack the books to understand it; engaging). Stay away from Wheel of Time. (Gotta make that my signature.)

Yeah geez, they're like the holy trinity of SF!

Hey you insensitve clod! TEFL is an awesome heinlein! As is The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. The nausea-inducer is Number of the Beast (gratuitous, needless, and woefully unexpected incest), but even that's a pretty fun story if you skip those parts. TEFL's incest at least has some sf meaning (not just mom sex for the hell of it). Uh, yeah! Heinlein rules SF!

mod up

Bitches are getting good! If I see an interesting link on FB that hasn't popped up in my reader, I go to the source site and try to find the linked article myself because, well, it's FB. But I noticed a crazy-sounding headline from The Washington Post, went to the wp site, never found it, went back to fb and hovered over the link, ready to warn the friend that they'd clicked the wrong link — hoverlink pointed to trove.fb.xxxxxxx (one of those apps for "social sharing" every 'article' you read in the app). I didn't allow the app, of course, but the headline being on the WP bugged me; back on wp.com, I finally found a barely-related article that had a sentence buried deep inside it that alluded to the sensationalistic headline linked on fb. I should have known: the Post dumbs down the articles for fb (why would anyone want to admit to reading the dumbed-down versions?).

.

These apps are hell! Why not just go to the WP and read the whole article there? It's like AOL came back from the 90s, bigger and badder (content not served to you; you have to beg for it by approving each 'app', and then you just get a morsel instead of the whole content). And ppl want this?!

Fine; let em have it. I now officially support these fb malware apps — funny to watch in action, and maybe enough of them will teach people not to use these 'apps'. And booyah on the Post for succumbing to the dumbing down of content to feed the masses.

last night; I did the unthinkable and turned adblock off and chat on, then subscribed/all to several ppl I don't normally interact with. Saw some of their chats in the clear on the news ticker. Had a bit of fun myself emailing one the contents of her chat [with a person I'd never heard of before]... the girl thought I was "hacking" her, LOL, but I told her how to do it as well.

But apparently FB cleaned this up; I haven't been able to replicate it today.

The best part; ppl I warned about it DIDN'T CARE if "only FB" could see the chats; they were concerned primarily that their chats might be broadcast to the world. *facepalm*

recoll, lucene, copernic, locate32... google desktop and it's included "features" wasn't that great, anyway. I see this as a positive development so more projects can get well-deserved support. Let Google focus on the sky while the rest of us work.

not even sure it's available anymore; but that, and maybe the 16-bit DOS art of assembly.

Some of us started checking this out a while ago, and there's a new-ish write-up about 'logging features' at InfectedROM ( http://infectedrom.com/content.php/154-HTCs-User-Behavior-Logging ), but what's not said is that it's not only htc phones that have these "features" of logging every single event on the phone and syncing it to cloud servers somewhere.

(htc, google, and amazon iirc)

For now, I've set the offending dirs to read-only so no files are written, and all's well, but I don't think reading the fine print buried in settings>about>legal is akin to "explicitly asking for permission".

(And I don't think having to root your phone to chmod dirs read-only is a user-friendly way to decline these "features")

IIRC a Googler said it was used [maybe legitimately] for 'debugging', but the number of files found (in each directory) logging every event was offensive if only for the amount of phone storage it eats up (and I won't even go there re: syncing those files to clouds and bad data plans—I suppose a few MBs/day isn't a huge deal).

(Of course, my biggest concern is privacy :)